What is the Bloomsbury Project?

The Leverhulme-funded UCL Bloomsbury Project was established to investigate 19th-century Bloomsbury’s development from swampy rubbish-dump to centre of intellectual life

Led by Professor Rosemary Ashton, with Dr Deborah Colville as Researcher, the Project has traced the origins, Bloomsbury locations, and reforming significance of hundreds of progressive and innovative institutions

Many of the extensive archival resources relating to these institutions have also been identified and examined by the Project, and Bloomsbury’s developing streets and squares have been mapped and described

This website is a gateway to the information gathered and edited by Project members during the Project’s lifetime, 1 October 2007–30 April 2011, with the co-operation of Bloomsbury’s institutions, societies, and local residents

Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury Project

Cartoon satirising the British College of Health

Bloomsbury Institutions

Bloomsbury Streets, Squares, and Buildings

Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury Project

Rev. Baptist Wriothesley Noel (1799–1873)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was a reformist and evangelical member of the Church of England clergy who later became a Nonconformist minister

He was minister of St John’s Chapel, Bedford Row, from 1827 until his dramatic secession from the Church of England there in 1848 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

His first sermon in a Nonconformist church was at the National Scotch Church, Regent Square in 1849

In 1849 he was baptised by immersion at the John Street Baptist Chapel, and became its Minister from 1849 to 1869

He was involved with the London City Mission in its early days, but resigned in 1837, ironically because its agents were predominantly Baptist (John Campbell, Memoirs of David Nasmith: His Labours and Travels in Great Britain, France, the United States, and Canada, 1844)

He later became one of the Examiners of Missionaries for David Nasmith’s follow-up mission, the Country Towns’ Mission (Country Towns Mission Record, November 1853)

He was also involved in the foundation of the Society for Promoting Female Education in China, India, and the East, and the Midnight Meeting Movement

For more general biographical information about Rev. Baptist Wriothesley Noel, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography